Use your business data to your advantage with the help of Syncfusion’s new data science offerings. Discover how a custom big data solution can provide your company with valuable predictions about key market trends.

Pragmatic information that is designed to get you building and exploring with Rainmeter

Who This Book Is For

This book is geared towards PC users with sufficient working knowledge of Windows. You should be comfortable with surfing the Web, and downloading and manipulating files on your desktop to start with. We will provide you with the rest.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Instant Rainmeter Desktop Customization Tool How-to

Installing Rainmeter (Simple)

Managing Rainmeter skin layout and composition (Simple)

Installing additional skins (Simple)

Adding captions to your wallpaper (Simple)

Adding dynamic captions to your desktop (Simple)

Building a bar graph cityscape (Intermediate)

Giving a label to Memory Plaza (Intermediate)

Adding more buildings in an efficient manner (Intermediate)

Turning your desktop into your personal art gallery (Intermediate)

Improving your memory with desktop Flashcards (Intermediate)

Displaying and controlling music playback from your desktop (Advanced)

Putting the news on your desktop (Advanced)

Creating interactive Flashcards (Advanced)

What You Will Learn

Customize your Windows desktop with Rainmeter widgets

Download and mix and match other widgets for a truly unique style

Develop a solid understanding of core Rainmeter concepts from which to start building

Turn your desktop into a live gallery

Create interactive widgets to control your music collection, or to improve your memory

Make your desktop truly dynamic and interactive

Invent a news widget that displays headlines

Create text widgets that display custom messages

In Detail

Rainmeter lets you create and place custom widgets and readings on your Windows Desktop. Rainmeter is easy to pick up and is open to experimentation, giving the tinkerer a great starting point to learn how to hack.

Instant Rainmeter Desktop Customization How-to is a friendly tour of the Rainmeter application. You’ll learn how to create some nifty projects using easy-to-follow instructions and diagrams. Each project is followed with a deep dive of the code employed to provide an understanding of exactly how the project works.

This practical book will teach you how to customize your Windows desktop from a simple static wallpaper image into a dynamic data panel.

Starting from a simple task, you will learn how to add captions to your desktop and how to turn your desktop into your personal art gallery. Going deeper into Rainmeter, you will learn how to get really creative by building a cityscape out of bar graphs. You will be shown Rainmeter’s extensive set of out of the box tools as well as how to create useful tools for yourself, such as interactive flashcards.

Authors

Ken Lim

Ken Lim is a computer programmer and tinkerer. When he isn’t working on his day job as part of the team developing the award-winning Guardian News website (http://www.guardian.co.uk), he builds robots, designs lightsabers, and fixes toys his son has broken.
This is his first book.

Alerts & Offers

Series & Level

We understand your time is important. Uniquely amongst the major publishers, we seek to develop and publish the broadest range of learning and information products on each technology. Every Packt product delivers a specific learning pathway, broadly defined by the Series type. This structured approach enables you to select the pathway which best suits your knowledge level, learning style and task objectives.

Learning

As a new user, these step-by-step tutorial guides will give you all the practical skills necessary to become competent and efficient.

Beginner's Guide

Friendly, informal tutorials that provide a practical introduction using examples, activities, and challenges.

Essentials

Fast paced, concentrated introductions showing the quickest way to put the tool to work in the real world.

Cookbook

A collection of practical self-contained recipes that all users of the technology will find useful for building more powerful and reliable systems.

Blueprints

Guides you through the most common types of project you'll encounter, giving you end-to-end guidance on how to build your specific solution quickly and reliably.

Mastering

Take your skills to the next level with advanced tutorials that will give you confidence to master the tool's most powerful features.

Starting

Accessible to readers adopting the topic, these titles get you into the tool or technology so that you can become an effective user.

Progressing

Building on core skills you already have, these titles share solutions and expertise so you become a highly productive power user.